Coffee is widely consumed throughout the world and whilst the coffee supply business is generally considered to be fairly lucrative, it is often the case that not all parties in the supply chain derive the same financial benefit.
In a typical supply chain, farmers (often in third world countries) grow and harvest coffee cherries. These cherries are then subjected to a number of processing operations that remove the flesh and a paper-like skin (known as “parchment”) to leave raw coffee beans (otherwise known as “green” coffee beans). These beans are then sold for a relatively small amount of money to processing organisations (often in Europe or North America) that roast and grind the beans on a commercial scale. The processing organisations then sell the roasted beans and ground beans to retailers at a much inflated price, and the retailers then sell to the general public, again at a much increased price.
A problem with this arrangement is that farmers are often not fairly rewarded for their efforts, as the farmers will typically only receive a small percentage of the final sale price. Not only is this arrangement bad for the farmers, but it is also bad for consumers as they will typically have to pay much higher prices than if they had been able to source their coffee directly from the farmers, or even from the processors.
Another problem with this arrangement is that roasted coffee beans tend not to stay fresh for as long as green coffee beans, and as a consequence a consumer's cup of coffee is not as fresh as it would have been had the beans been kept in their unroasted “green” state until used. This problem is exacerbated when roasted coffee beans are ground, and to counteract this many manufacturers vacuum pack their ground coffee before supplying it to consumers. Whilst vacuum packing ground coffee does help to keep the coffee fresh, consumers can find that coffee quickly goes stale once the vacuum seal is broken.
To attempt to provide consumers with a fresher cup of coffee, it has previously been proposed to provide domestic roasting apparatus so that consumers can roast their own green coffee beans.
One such device is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,185,171. This US Patent discloses a roaster for coffee beans or the like where beans are fed into a roasting air stream at an air stream entrance. The air stream blows the beans from the entrance and generally upwards along a bean guide to an altitude from which they drop back into a hopper and from thence back to the entrance. The hopper includes a constriction which controls the rate of admission of the beans into the air stream, and the bean guide includes a valve that can be opened so that beans are diverted out of the roaster once they have been roasted.
Whilst this apparatus does enable consumers to roast their own coffee beans it is relatively noisy in operation, and as it typically takes several minutes to roast a supply of beans the apparatus is much more intrusive in a domestic environment than other items of domestic kitchenware, such as a kettle for example. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that as the apparatus vertically circulates the beans; the fan needs to operate at a relatively high speed. Another problem with this apparatus is that the provision of a mechanical valve to allow roasted beans to be blown from the roaster introduces additional moving parts, and hence provides additional parts that could potentially malfunction.
A further problem to be addressed is that correctly roasting beans is something of a black art, in that certain beans will respond differently to different roasting processes (for example, processes that roast beans for different lengths or time or at different temperatures). Since domestic bean roasters of the type described above subject all beans to the same roasting process, not all of these beans will be roasted as well as they might otherwise be were the roasting process to be controllable. However, whilst providing users with the ability to control the roasting process may well be appreciated by some users, there will likely be others who find the controls too confusing. Even those users who are comfortable controlling the process themselves would likely find, after the novelty had worn off, such a device to be tedious and difficult to use properly.
As it is advantageous for consumers to be able to roast their own coffee beans, it would be beneficial if the aforementioned problems could be addressed.